Children and young people with mental health problems face ‘agonising waits’ before they get help

Young people and children with mental health problems are facing ‘agonising waits’ before they receive help, a major report by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) has found.

CQC found that, whilst most specialist services provide good quality care, too many young people find it difficult to access services and so, do not receive the care that they need when they need it, with one young person waiting for 18 months to receive treatment.

A study from Public Health England suggested that less than 25% – 35% of those with a diagnosable mental health condition accessed support.

The CQC findings showed that even when children were able to access treatment, the services were not always adequate as 39 percent of specialist community child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) required improvement.

However, Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust, who run the Rochdale CAMHS service, Healthy Young Minds, were rated in 2016 as ‘outstanding’ for their child and adolescent inpatient services and ‘good’ for their community mental health services for children and young people.

Claire Murdoch, Mental Health Director for NHS England said: "It is factually unarguable that after years of underinvestment, NHS funding for young people's mental health services is now going up - in the past year alone, the figures show young people’s mental health spending has gone up by £100 million. This 15% increase far outstrips the overall rise in mental health spending, which itself is now rising far faster than the overall NHS budget.

"Without a doubt, after years of drought, the NHS' mental health funding taps have now been turned on. So around the country, these critical services are beginning to expand and improve, with three quarters of young people now getting urgent eating disorder care within one week. But NHS England has also been explicit about the scale of unmet need, which recent improvements have inevitably only been able to begin to tackle.

"It's going to take years of concerted practical effort to solve these service gaps - even with new money - given the time it inescapably takes to train the extra child psychiatrists, therapists and nurses required."

Dr Paul Lelliott, who led the report, said: “We have listened to children and young people who have used services so that we can better understand the strengths, weaknesses, barriers and bridges to care they have experienced. We will now take their voices into the next phase of this work, so that we can make effective recommendations for an improved system.

"There are many people out there working to make sure that children and young people who experience mental health issues are offered caring support. Their dedication is to be celebrated. However, we must also address those times when a child or young person feels let down or not listened to and make sure the same level of support is available to each and every one of them.

"The commissioning of this review indicates that the Government considers children and young people’s mental health to be a national priority. The Five Year Forward View for Mental Health sets out plans to improve access to high quality care close to home and more money has been allocated to develop these vital services. The complexity and fragmentation of the system is an obstacle that must be overcome if this new investment is to result in better services to meet the mental health needs of children and young people."

Richard Watts, Chairman of the Local Government Association’s Children and Young People Board, responded: “This report highlights the urgency with which we need to tackle the crisis facing children and young people’s mental health, and its findings are further evidence that children are not getting the treatment they need, when they need it. It reveals the fragmentation, complexity and variation of a service that investment alone cannot solve.

“At the moment we have a mental health system that still says no rather than yes to children when they ask for help with problems such as depression, anxiety, family issues and bereavement.

“Councils, which play a critical role in improving the lives of all residents, want the Government’s green paper on children’s mental health to deliver the root and branch reform it so desperately needs.”

He continued: “Mental health must be put on the same footing as physical health. Greater investment is needed in community-based preventive services, such as counselling in schools, which gives children and young people the support they need and keeps them out of hospital in the first place.

“We cannot continue with a system that is leaving thousands of children and families in distress, causing lifelong damage and preventing them from reaching their true potential.”

Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust has been invited to comment.